9 out of 10 Australian households are considering switching to solar power

What are you waiting for to go solar?

A new survey of Australian households conducted by Ernst & Young across regional and metro Victoria, NSW and Queensland found 9 out of 10 Australians have considered or would consider switching to solar power. The main motivation is cutting electricity bills, but environmental benefits - especially in a huge coal burner and exporter like Australia - no doubt have appeal too.

Solar is becoming unbeatable in Australia....

As previouslymentioned on TreeHugger, the land of Oz is undergoing a real solar revolution right now, with even setting itself a 50% renewable energy target for 2025. An image is worth a thousand words:

"Australia’s uptake of solar PV has soared from about 1,000 installations/year a decade ago to nearly 200,000 last year, with 1.2 million installed across Australia since 2001," writes RENE.

...the rest of the world will follow!

The reason why solar is becoming unbeatable is simple: Price per watt went down over 100x in the past 3-4 decades, and it's not stopping going down over the long-term. There might be bumps in the road, supply constraints, etc, but in general, this is a bit similar to Moore's Law with CPUs. Over time, we'll get more watts of solar per dollar, and anyone with the ability to look ahead should see that this means at some point a very, very large fraction of our energy will come from solar simply because it'll be cheaper than anything else (and as grid-scale storage goes down in price too, solar will become more convenient too).

The International Energy Agency has recently released a report that predicts that solar power will go all the way down to 4 cents per kilowatt in the coming decades, helping it become the dominant source of power generation across the world by 2050.

The two IEA technology roadmaps show how solar photovoltaic (PV) systems could generate up to 16% of the world’s electricity by 2050 while solar thermal electricity (STE) from concentrating solar power (CSP) plants could provide an additional 11%. Combined, these solar technologies could prevent the emission of more than 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2050 – that is more than all current energy-related CO2 emissions from the United States or almost all of the direct emissions from the transport sector worldwide today.

Photovoltaic solar had about 137 GW of capacity installed worldwide at the end of 2013, and about 100 MW are being added every single day!